BarkingDogs.net

The Extent of the Chronic Barking Crisis

Local government regards chronic barking as a small-time event unworthy of serious concern, but consider the following. Let's say that your neighbor's dog wakes you up four or five times each night. That's an average of 30 times each week. That means the dog will wake you roughly 120 times in a single month for a total of 1,440 wake-up calls each year.

Now, assume that you're amazingly good at getting back to sleep so, on average, you lie awake for only five minutes before falling back to sleep. In one year's time that comes to 120 hours of sleep you will lose to your neighbor's dog. But, of course, you are not the only person the dog is waking!

I want to keep these numbers on the conservative side so no one will accuse me of exaggerating, so let's say that each time the dog barks he wakes five people who, like you, are each awake for only five minutes before falling back to sleep. That comes to a neighborhood total of 600 hours a year that the dog is keeping people awake. If the dog lives for only ten years that comes to 6,000 hours that one dog will keep people awake in his life time. But of course, few of us can consistently get back to sleep in five minutes, especially if we're reawakened repeatedly, and many dogs live longer than ten years. Therefore, realistically, the number of hours of lost sleep generated by a single irresponsible dog owner, keeping a single barking dog in a densely populated neighborhood, is probably closer to 15,000 hours. Multiply that times the number of dogs that bark in your neighborhood each night and you start to get a grasp of the extent of the problem.

What's more, the situation is rapidly deteriorating. The United States Environmental Protection Agency reports that the number of households keeping dogs is growing by five percent each year, with, no doubt, a concomitant increase in our noise levels. Worse yet, an enormous number of the new dogs that are finding their way into our neighborhoods are older rescue animals,with bad habits intact, that are being sold at a profit to people who do not possess the knowledge or the skills, let alone the commitment, necessary to bark train them, and keep them in a quiet manner.

This page is part of Section Six:
the More Information section of barkingdogs.net